Fellow Republicans,

When obvious things go unspoken long enough, people have a way of forgetting them. Traditions are rotely followed year after year, but given enough time, their reasons are forgotten, being followed without understanding. New people replace the old, and oral histories fail to be passed on, leaving organizations (and even nations) at sea without a rudder. Or, as is common in a political setting where power is at stake, a few interests, sometimes devious ones, take control without meaningful counterweight, running the ship aground for the selective benefit of a few. This is what I have observed in my time within the party the last few years, and I hope to do my part in mending it.

The bottom line is that our nation cannot bear another Democrat administration. Under Obama, and then Biden, we have watched as traitorous people with allegiance to global, rather than American interests, have sought to undermine our electoral process, destroy our history, pervert our children, open the gates to invaders, institute Marxism, and disinherit us of this great land bequeathed to us by our forefathers. For all its problems, the Republican Party still believes in America, the land of the free and the home of the brave. The land our ancestors forged from wilderness with the sweat of their brow and by the grace of God.

The enemy is within the gates. Our institutions are on thin ice. We stand at the precipice of either destruction, or a future that science fiction writers have dreamed about for a hundred years, and we owe it to our children and grandchildren to put the ship back on course. I believe, as I am sure you do, that the Republican Party is the political vehicle to do this. And for Indiana Republicans, the most pressing matter before us is the 2026 convention.

I sincerely believe restoring our convention to its proper status as a deliberative body with authority is the first step towards restoring our institutions, and one which is in your power to do. This first issue will be focused on providing the context for this convention, both historically, and in terms of process. I hope at the end, you will be asking yourself what you can do to help. Anticipating this, a second publication will be sent covering what exactly we can do about it. It is with all sobriety, and thoughts of my responsibility to my posterity that I undertake this project. With that I commit it to you.

Joseph Bortka, Editor

WHAT IS OUR CONVENTION?

A Convention is a deliberative assembly of delegates, or representatives. See RONR, 12th Ed, §58. Political Conventions in their present form are an American tradition. As Russel M. Seeds (A late 19th century Indiana Republican State Secretary) put it, 'the average foreigner has an impression that when 3 or 4 Americans get together, the first thing they do is to adopt a written constitution and then proclaim a set of resolutions.' The convention process is truly a cornerstone of American republicanism, an inheritance passed down to us from our forefathers, and ours to cherish or squander.

The Indiana Republican State Convention is the highest governing body of our State Party Organization. It is the one occasion when delegates, the elected representatives of Republican voters across all 92 counties, assemble to speak with collective authority on all matters of party business, setting the agenda for the Republicans we elect to public offices up and down the ballot. Historically, Indiana Republicans have done many things at convention, such as nominating candidates, passing resolutions (including the party platform), electing delegates to the national convention, electing the State Central Committee, and more.

Presently, the Convention nominates candidates for Lt. Governor, Secretary of State, Attorney General, Treasurer, and Comptroller. The convention also drafts and adopts a platform in midterm election years. But this is not all it can do. The convention meets on an infrequent, temporary basis. While it has the authority to act on any business pertinent to the Indiana Republican Party, it does not remain in session year round, and so appoints a State Central Committee (Now referred to as the Indiana Republican State Committee or IRSC), to carry out its business from day to day, including and especially, mounting effective electoral campaigns to get Republicans in office who will implement the policies that the party promises voters in its platform. The Convention sets the overall mission of the party, and the Central Committee is to carry out this mission in the intervening years. The relationship is akin to that between shareholders (delegates) and a board of directors (the Central Committee). At least in theory.

Over the past several years, the IRSC has quietly rewritten the rules governing the Convention in ways that diminish the authority of delegates and concentrate power in the committee itself. I aim to present what we have observed and to explain the incentives at work. To do that properly, it is best to recall some history.

EARLY CONVENTION HISTORY

1854. A tumultuous time in our history. The Whig party had fallen apart. The Kansas-Nebraska Act threatened to extend slavery into new territories and was seen by many as a breach of the Missouri Compromise. In Indiana, former Whigs, anti-slavery Democrats, Free Soilers, Know-Nothings, and others found themselves without a political home.

Lt. Col. Henry S. Lane called a state convention in Indianapolis. Ten thousand people reportedly gathered. The goal? Bring together several different interests, forming a coalition that could beat the Democrats in the coming election, breaking a decade-long grip on State Government. The resulting platform, slate of candidates, and central committee, was enough that this new party, then known as the People's party, was able to take the Indiana House of Representatives, 9 of 11 seats in the U.S. House, and 4 statewide offices that fall. Within 6 years, the nascent fusion party had become the Republican Party. By 1860, Abraham Lincoln had won the presidency, and Henry S. Lane had become the first Republican Governor of Indiana.

In the intervening years, the Party maintained its general structure, though some modifications have occurred. In the first few conventions the IRSC was granted authority directly named by the convention in resolutions, and other times through delegated authority by the state convention chairmen. Eventually the modern precinct committee structure came into being without protest, and the IRSC began to be chosen by County Chairs through the modern committee structure. Through this, the committee's rules continued to acknowledge the convention as the highest authority within the Indiana Republican Party until 2024, but more on that later.

THE MODERN ERA

2005. The IRSC was incorporated under Indiana's nonprofit laws. This was presumably a reasonable attempt to protect the committee members from the liabilities of the party. The incorporating documents make no mention of the convention, and although the convention never agreed to transfer such authority to the committee, these documents were recently used in court to argue on the record, that the only members of the Indiana Republican Party are the State Committee members. That's right, the state committee doesn't think you are a member of the Republican Party! See 49D02-2507-CT-033096 for more info.

2008-2012. Delegates supporting Ron Paul attempted to nominate delegates to the national convention in district caucuses. Leadership denied them even a vote by ignoring Robert's Rules. Coincidentally, 2012 was the last year the convention chose national convention delegates. The IRSC claimed that function for itself. This was the first key movement of the IRSC seizing a role from the delegates because, presumably, delegates such as you can't be trusted to make the right decision.

2016. This was the last year district caucuses were held before the main convention. District caucuses chose members of the convention committees and served as a filtering mechanism for delegate business. The IRSC now performs all of these functions without delegate input. This also was the last year the platform was on the agenda at a convention in a presidential election year.

2018. Party leadership proposed platform language that would have removed the primacy of traditional marriage from the platform. Daniel Elliot, now State Treasurer, rallied Hoosier Republicans by publicly announcing that he would bring the matter to the floor of the convention via appropriate procedural mechanisms if it was not fixed. To avoid a floor fight, the matter was put on the ballot in the same manner as the nominations. Traditional marriage remained in the platform in a resounding repudiation of encroaching leftism in the upper echelons of the Indiana GOP. Whether by design or coincidence, the IRSC officially erased Robert's Rules from their convention procedures in the conventions that followed, a move which continues to haunt Indiana Republican Conventions to this day.

2020. The convention was held remotely via zoom due to COVID with abbreviated procedures.

2022. Delegate Ken Colbert along with others, sought a vote of the convention on a platform amendment recognizing the importance of election integrity. With district caucuses eliminated, his only path was to challenge the proposed standing rules at the full convention. When he raised a point of order to invoke his right to debate, the chairman ignored him despite loud protests from the floor. The committee's private security intervened. The convention proceeded without further incident, but the damage was done.

2024. Lt. Governor Micah Beckwith had announced that he planned to run for Lt. Gov, bucking the common practice of the convention approving whoever the Governor candidate chooses. Although unusual in the modern era it was not entirely unprecedented. There are records of contested Lt. Gov races going back into the 19th century. The gambit paid off as many of you saw first hand.

Also in 2024, myself and a few other delegates prepared resolutions on priorities we believed the convention should communicate to our Republican elected officials. But the resolutions also served a second purpose: to establish, through the convention's own action, that delegates retain the right to bring business before the body, a right that had been openly denied just two years prior. We announced our intentions in advance, only to discover that the State Chairman had not appointed a resolutions committee, a function that just a few years earlier belonged to the district caucuses. At the convention, the chairman announced that points of order would not be recognized. Our motion was allowed to be presented and briefly argued, but was then ruled out of order. When we appealed and received a second, the chairman declared that appeals were not in order either, denying the convention its right to decide the question for itself. It is important to point out that the convention quite possibly would have voted against us. That would have been acceptable. But the chairman instead could not stand the thought that the convention might, in fact, be with us. This brings us naturally to a discussion of parliamentary law.

PARLIAMENTARY LAW: WHAT'S IT ALL FOR?

Why do things like Robert's Rules matter? Why does it matter that the convention chairman ignored this or that rule? To summarize, parliamentary procedure is the machinery of the Republican form of government. Like the layup is fundamental to basketball, procedure is fundamental to our representative government. Groups of people, from your township board to the United States Senate, must have ways of making decisions as a group in an orderly way. Just think for a second how difficult it is to get 5 or 10 people to make effective decisions. Now consider that problem on the scale of the 435 Representatives in the U.S. House. It's no easy task, but with a common procedure, what can be chaos is transformed into the orderly disposition of business.

Forms of parliamentary procedure are recorded back to Ancient Greece and Rome. Our Parliamentary law tradition is traced back to the practices of Germanic tribes, which made their way to England with the Anglo-Saxon invasions of the 500s. These Germanic tribes had a structured committee system you might recognize, with the "village-moot", which met locally, the "hundred-moot" where each village sent representatives to a district meeting, which in turn sent representatives to their "folk-moot" which oversaw the whole tribe. The practices of these barbarian councils later became the rules of the English Parliament, with some manuals dating to the early 1300s. In the American Colonies those English parliamentary traditions and councils lived on and became what we know today in our various local, state, and federal assemblies, all with the goal of facilitating debate and decision on the many issues that require legislative input from the representatives chosen to govern.

Over time, private associations and societies began to repurpose these same procedures for their own group decisionmaking. In early America there was still much regional difference in how parliamentary law was applied, and so around the time of the civil war, Henry M. Robert sought to standardize the parliamentary process such that one could go to any region of the country and have standardized meeting practices. This became Robert's Rules of Order, which is now almost synonymous with parliamentary law in the United States.

And that brings it to you, Precinct Committeemen and Delegates, the bedrock of the Republican Party. What is your role and what can you do? Fundamentally, you are members of the Indiana Republican Party, and that means something.

MEMBERS

Every assembly has members, and every member has certain rights. A member is a person entitled to fully participate in the proceedings of the assembly. Precinct Committeemen are members of the county committee. Delegates are members of the convention. The basic rights of membership include the right to attend meetings, make motions, speak in debate, access certain records of the organization, and vote. Every official action of the organization starts as a motion, which is brought by a member, and any member can bring a motion. That motion is debated, then voted on and decided by the members present. This process is led by the Chairman, but only the full assembly itself can abrogate these rights by a vote, often a 2/3 vote.

THE CHAIRMAN

The chairman is the facilitator of the assembly. His job is to keep order, call votes, and make sure the rules are followed so that business moves efficiently. He balances the rights of the majority against the rights of the minority and of individual members. It is through this balancing that all possibilities are considered and, hopefully, the best decision is made. It is a difficult and important job.

But the chairman is not a dictator. He has only limited powers unless the assembly grants him more. He makes procedural rulings and calls votes to keep business moving, but any ruling he makes can be challenged by any member through an appeal, and the full assembly decides by vote whether the chairman was right. The chairman's job is to facilitate decisions, not to make them. When no one challenges a ruling, the matter is considered settled, not because the chairman had the final word, but because the assembly agreed by consent.

There are even times, especially in smaller meetings, where the rules are technically violated but no one objects, and this is okay, because the point is not rigid adherence to procedure, the point is getting business done. The assembly can abbreviate its own rules by general consent or by vote. The rules matter most not when there is agreement, but when there is a dispute. When disputes happen, the rules serve as due process: they give any member a way to voice concerns, bring the matter before the full assembly for discussion, and resolve it by vote. And if a disruptive member tries to abuse this process to obstruct business, there are procedural tools to handle that too. A good chairman knows these tools and helps the assembly use them fairly.

The trouble comes when the members don't know the rules well enough to enforce them, and the chairman (or factions within the assembly), uses that ignorance to inappropriately accumulate power. This is our next topic.

ABUSE OF PROCESS

Recently, it generated national controversy when Rep. Kevin McCarthy was removed as Speaker of the House, essentially the chairman of that body. Several Representatives sought to claw back extreme powers that had been granted to the Speaker over many years through procedural deals. The principle was simple: the Speaker had become too powerful, and the members wanted their authority back.

Here at home, Indiana GOP chairmen perform reasonable duties like filling vacant committee spots and presiding over meetings. The current IRSC rules go much further in regards to state officials, and some provisions directly undermine the ability of the convention to operate as a deliberative body, and are the subject of ongoing litigation. The following have been added only in the last few years. From the Rules of the Indiana Republican State Committee (dated February 12, 2026):

Rule 7-24 states that any motion "outside of the stated purpose of the convention" may only come to the floor "at the discretion of the State Chairman." Meanwhile, Rule 7-23 limits the stated purpose of the convention to just two things: nominating candidates, and adopting a platform in midterm years. The effect is that delegates cannot bring any other business, resolutions, rules changes, or anything else, unless the chairman permits it.

Rule 7-26 states that no resolution or platform amendment may come before the full convention unless it appears in the committee report or is brought by the State Chairman. And under Rule 7-14, the State Chairman appoints the chairman of each convention committee. So the chairman selects the people who decide what the delegates are allowed to vote on.

Rule 7-43 strips delegates of the right to appeal the chairman's rulings. Under standard parliamentary law, any member may appeal, and the full assembly decides by vote. Under Rule 7-43, only the State Chairman may initiate an appeal, and only State Committee members, not delegates, vote on it.

Most striking of all, Rule 1-1 was amended following the 2024 convention to say: "Subject to the Republican Party of the State of Indiana in the State Convention duly assembled, The State Committee is the supreme Party authority in this state."

These are not minor procedural adjustments made for efficiency. Taken together, they mean that delegates cannot introduce business the chairman doesn't approve of, cannot bring resolutions the committee doesn't endorse, cannot appeal rulings they believe are wrong, and cannot act outside a narrow agenda set for them in advance. These new rules undermine the ability of the convention to operate as an authoritative, deliberative body and are thus void.

As of this writing, these rule changes are being challenged in court. It is my argument that the State Committee cannot make rules which frustrate the convention's ability to act. Their role in the convention is ministerial only. They handle logistics and carry out the convention's directives, not meaningfully bind the convention. The State Committee serves entirely at the pleasure of the Convention because the Convention created the State Committee, and the historical record shows this.

The convention has been reduced from a governing body to a rubber stamp. There is no opportunity for debate in an open forum. The trappings of parliamentary procedure and deliberative process have become a theater performance.

BUT WHY?

Why would anyone go to the trouble of dismantling these processes? Because there is power in the process itself. A convention that can debate, amend, and vote is a convention that can say things party leadership would rather not hear. If 1,800 delegates can get a majority vote on a resolution, that is not merely an expression of opinion, it is an organized demonstration of political will that is very difficult for elected officials to ignore.

They might say that the convention has too many people to run an orderly meeting. We have meetings where delegates can provide input on the platform. That's good enough, isn't it? No it is not, because in platform hearings, delegates have no membership rights. District caucuses were formerly the proper place to bring business before the main convention so that business could be compressed. Move your platform amendment in the district caucus, and if you can't convince your district to approve it, there isn't much sense in bringing it to the full convention. But now even that vehicle has been removed.

When the process is controlled by a few people, those people decide which conversations the party has and which ones it avoids. Conversations about casinos. About wind and solar development. About foreign ownership of Indiana real estate. About data centers. About election integrity and voter fraud. These are issues where powerful interests spend significant money to shape policy, and the convention is one of the few places where their money doesn't buy as much influence.

This is why the platform matters. This is why resolutions matter. And this is why the procedural rights of delegates are not a technicality, they are the mechanism by which ordinary Republicans exercise authority over their own party. Take away the process, and you take away the power.

SO, WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO ABOUT IT?

The 2026 State Convention meets June 19-20. Between now and then, every Delegate has a choice to make: show up informed, or show up as a spectator.

First, learn the basics of parliamentary procedure. You don't need to be an expert, but every county committee should have several who are. The introduction and first three chapters of Robert's Rules of Order Newly Revised, 12th Edition, will give you enough to understand the big picture. Second, talk to your fellow delegates and Precinct Committeemen. Find out if they share your concerns. The strength of the convention is in its numbers, but only if those numbers are organized.

At the convention itself, delegates should be prepared to support resolutions reaffirming the convention's authority over the State Committee, restoring the right of appeal, and restoring a meaningful process for delegates to bring business before the body (such as reinstating district caucuses). Delegates should also be prepared to handle situations where Party leadership continues to violate the rules. The details of these efforts, what to watch out for, and what we will ask you to do will be the subject of the next issue.

This is not about any one person, faction, or candidate. It is about whether the Indiana Republican Party will be governed by its members through the institution they created for that purpose, or managed from the top down by special interests through a committee that has quietly assumed powers the convention never gave it.

I do not say this lightly: these are times that will determine whether the United States remains a constitutional Republic. Self-governance is difficult. It requires patience, good faith, and a willingness to hear from people who disagree with you. But if we intend to keep what we have inherited, we must become competent stewards of the institutions of republican government, starting with our own party, in our own county committees, at our own conventions. History tells us that what we have is a fragile thing. This is a call to action and a call to assume responsibility. As Ben Franklin once said, we have "A Republic, if you can keep it." It's up to you.

Joseph Bortka, Editor
Precinct Committeeman and Delegate